MVC in PHP

This project aims to provide an MVC PHP framework for you to use in your projects. If you want to see an example there is a complete example here about an e-commerce website.

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What is MVC?

Briefly, MVC (Model View Controller) is a design pattern widely used in projects because it leaves the project structured in order to facilitate the identification of application modules, understand how it is structured, in addition to facilitating maintenance. It structures the project in three modules:

Name	Funcion
Models	Responsible for business logic
View	Responsible for the visual part
Controllers	Responsible for the behavior of the visual part

Nomenclature

This project adopted the following naming pattern:

Type	Name
Controller	<ControllerName>Controller
View	<viewName>

How to use this structure in my project?

In src folder is all what you need to apply this pattern in your project.

How to create new models, views and controllers?

This framework uses autoload for loading classes. Consequently, you have to use namespace's and use's in classes.

Models

All models have to extend Model class. Also, they must use namespace models. Lastly, when you create your modal classes, put them in models folder.

Views

The views have all html content, with as little php as possible. To use the information present in a controller, use the data sent by the controller through an array (you don't use the array directly, but instead use a variable whose name is the same as the array key name).

Example

• Controller

• View

Controllers

Controllers have to extend Controller class. Also, they must use namespace controllers. All controllers must be in controllers folder. This class has 2 methods for showing a view and another that will be invoked depending on the url provided. Also, if you call a view using loadTemplate function, you must send the following attributes to the view:

• title
• description
• keywords (useful for SEO)
• robots ('index' if the page should be indexed by SEO; 'noindex' otherwise)

Example - Home controller

How this framework works?

When a url is sent to the server, it will parse it to identify three components:

• Controller
• Action
• Parameters

Name	Function
Controller	Will invoke the identified controller
Action	It is the method of the identified controller that will be called
Parameters	It is the parameters of the identified action

This parse is done in Core class. The main controller, that is, the one that will be called when accessing the website url, will be HomeController.

Note: If the sent controller does not exist, will be chosen NotFoundController, which will load 404 view.

Example

Default values

When some of these components are not sent they will have the following default values:

Name	Function
Controller	HomeController
Action	index
Parameters	Empty array

Template

All views are loaded inside a template view. You can define your website standards here, and all views will follow this standard. To do that, remember loading views with loadTemplate method.

Overview of a generic MVC PHP framework structure

Project organization

The MVC structure is in src folder.

/

Name	Type	Function
media	Directory	Visual information of the project
src	Directory	MVC framework

/src

Name	Type	Function
assets	Directory	Contains all application content files
controllers	Directory	Contains all application controller classes
core	Directory	Contains the classes responsable for the MVC operations
models	Directory	Contains all application model classes
vendor	Directory	Folder created by Composer - responsable for classes autoload
views	Directory	Contains all application view classes
.htaccess	File	Responsible for friendly url
composer.json	File	File created by Composer
config.py	File	Website configuration file (Database and website location)
environment.php	File	File responsible for defining which environment is in use
index.php	File	File responsible for starting the website
robots.txt	File	Determines which files crawlers can see

Environment

Indicates which environment is in use. There are two:

• Development

Loads configuration for local server.

• Production

Loads configuration for online server.